Sarah Marcus is a freelance journalist based in Tbilisi.

Panic and fury over fake television report on Russian invasion of Georgia

As many people around the world now know, an absolutely crazy thing happened here in Georgia on Saturday. Leading television station Imedi broadcast a fake report saying that Russian tanks were rolling into Georgia once more, Russian planes were bombing civilian targets, President Saakashvili had been assassinated and most of Georgia’s opposition had formed a provisional government and welcomed the Russian troops.

Before the broadcast started, the anchor of the programme on which it aired said that what would come next was a simulation of what could happen, but there then followed around 30 minutes of totally fake news, without any indication whatsoever that a Russian invasion was not really happening. When the report ended the anchor again said that it was fake, but it was too late at that stage for many Georgians who had been thrown into full-on panic.

The ‘news’ of the ‘invasion’ spread like wildfire – I heard when my neighbour, in a state of distress, knocked on my door to tell me about it, someone else saw people on street begin to run in panic, the mobile phone networks crashed as everyone tried to contact friends and family. The emergency services reported a peak in calls from people who’d suffered heart attacks.

One Georgian friend whose parents live in Gori, the city worst hit by the 2008 war and located near the de facto border with South Ossetia, said she and her brother frantically tried to work out how to gather enough money to get their parents out of the city by taxi – presuming taxis would already be charging rack rates to go in and out of Gori, as they did during the real war.

Two days after the event, the anger is still palpable here. And not surprisingly. It really does beggar belief that anyone could fail to realise that such a stunt would inflict serious anxiety on people who really did suffer the terror of war less than two years ago. Did the creators of this terrible fantasy not consider the effect this would have on the tens of thousands of refugees from the conflict of 2008, or on those who lost family in that war?

Giorgi Arveladze, the man in charge of Imedi, said that the station’s mistake was to think that 'the society would have perceived the broadcast adequately'. Arverladze, who apologised for the broadcast, used to be the chief of the Presidential administration and is a longtime Saakashvili ally.

As for Saakashvili, he said that while the report was ‘unpleasant’ and should have carried a banner saying it was a simulation throughout, the really unpleasant thing was that such a scenario could happen and the threat of a Russian invasion was real.

"But the major unpleasant thing about the yesterday's report – and I want everyone to realize it well – was that this report is maximally close to reality and maximally close to what may really happen, or to what Georgia's enemy keeps in mind," website civil.ge quoted him as saying on Georgian television.

There is widespread speculation that Saakashvili’s government, even the President himself, was behind the report or at least knew about it, though of course the authorities deny this.

We don’t now know who was behind the report, but the fact is that the President made a statement which failed to clearly and unequivocally condemn what has been decried not only by ordinary Georgians and opposition politicians, but also by government MPs and the US ambassador to Georgia.